L'esprit Sud Magazine posted a photo:
"The moment of change is the only poem."
Adrienne Rich
amber {in the shadow of za'ha'dum} posted a photo:
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
—Adrienne Rich
HBW everyone! :D
Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for being my friends.
I am gaining perspective.
America is less racist than ever, and that is so remarkable. We are still unfortunately homophobic but we CANNNOT give up. If Obama has taught us one thing, it is that! =)
amber {in the shadow of za'ha'dum} posted a photo:
—Adrienne Rich
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Happy Bokeh Wednesday!
I suggest you indulge yourself
Explore
#46
amber {in the shadow of za'ha'dum} posted a photo:
light raining down each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain not simply absence but
the presence of the past destructive
to living here and now Yet if I could instruct
myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed
in that grasp it would loosen Pain would have to stand
off from me and listen its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out all that is not mine
I am the pain of division creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones nor the miles
It is not separation calls me forth but I
Who am separation And remember
I have no existence apart from you
—Adrienne Rich
Explore
#199
Nikki O :-D posted a photo:
Women's month is celebrated during August in South Africa, as it marks the anniversary of the great Women's March of 1956.
On 9 August 1956, about 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against legislation aimed at tightening the apartheid government's control over the movement of black women in urban areas.
Following the attainment of South Africa's full democracy in 1994, August 9 was declared one of the country's new public holidays and is known as National Women's Day, with special focus on the abuse of women and their rights.
To all the wonderful women that I know, have a fantastic women's month and women's day on Sunday.
theatercab posted a photo:
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
WW Norton posted a photo:
Essays on Art in Society, 1996–2008
One of America's most distinguished poets explores the complex relationship between art and social justice.
Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich's essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators' worlds.
This powerful new collection includes a stirring response to the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today, a critique of three classic socialist manifestos, and a rereading of The Dead Lecturer, an early volume of poems by LeRoi Jones. Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.
208 pages, Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-393-07006-4
April 2009
Jacket design: Chin-Yee Lai
www.wwnorton.com
Darcy McCarty posted a photo:
This photo can also be seen at: languageisavirus.com/authors/adrienne-rich/photos.php
Storm Warnings
Adrienne Rich
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
amber {in the shadow of za'ha'dum} posted a photo:
—Adrienne Rich
This looks better on black
Taken last night as I was running out the door to my presentation. This outfit was really cool--my stylin' mother-in-law gave it to me for my birthday, but I hadn't had an occasion to wear it until now! I felt very cool. And lime.
jamelah posted a photo:
I'm working out an idea. It will either go somewhere or this will just be some pretentious crap I fiddled around with for awhile. We'll see.
Idiolect posted a photo:
Miracle Ice Cream
Adrienne Rich
Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.
Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of your heart.
HoneyB12 posted a photo:
(It's not too long & it's a great read-but not mandatory). I'm not usually a fan of the magnum opus, that why I mention it.)
*Diving into the Wreck *
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Adrienne Rich, " Diving into the Wreck"
amber {in the shadow of za'ha'dum} posted a photo:
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language of the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
—Adrienne Rich, Planetarium
amber {in the shadow of za'ha'dum} posted a photo:
The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.
Nothing but myself?....My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.
Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere --
even from a broken web.
—Adrienne Rich, Integrity
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all of adrienne's poems speak to me in one way or another. she is magical! this one reminds me of my own journey to knowing myself, the process that has taken me my entire life, and will sometimes change in an instant; the struggle between the two parts of my personality that seem so diametrically opposed most of the time (anger & tenderness seem as good as any other adjectives i've considered). it's often quite tiring! but, i suppose that just the way it goes. who knows--maybe everyone else feels the same way and i have just constructed elaborate walls inside my mind that make me wall myself off from the commonalities i have with other people.
it's sort of like knowing how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop: the world may never know.
BAD BAB posted a photo:
Day 126, May 6: Packing my friends to move them to a new home. I love books, but I wish sometimes we didn't have quite so many. Books are heavy.
"The Writer" by Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
